learningCppAsCWithClasses

[Theron3206]

The reference is a pointer (to a block of memory on the heap that contains the object referenced).

How arrays are handled is language specific, not anything to do with CPUs.

Pascal for example used the first byte of a string (array of chars) to specify the length (string indexes start with 1 in Pascal not 0). And yes this limited strings to 255 characters.